In this post, we will take a look at two of the top mobile app quality platforms out there, Instabug vs Sentry. These tools can help you monitor your app’s performance and crashes, as well as errors, network requests, battery consumption, and more.
Instabug vs Sentry for crash reporting: the similarities
The worst-case scenario that can affect a user’s experience is their session ending as a result of a crash or error. Both Instabug and Sentry help you avoid negative reviews with detailed crash reporting directly from your mobile app. With both, you will have full-stack monitoring on a large range of mobile platforms. On your dashboard, you will receive real-time updates and event alerts via email or customizable notifications.
Instabug and Sentry both allow you to track sessions, monitor general app stability, and provide indicators on release adoption. They both also detect a wide range of crashes including NDK and ANR-related crashes.
To accelerate your workflow, both support a vast suite of third-party integrations such as Jira, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, and much more. This allows for seamless integration into existing workflows. They also support automated upload of mapping/dSYM files using any CI/CD tool.
Instabug’s strengths
Diagnose and fix issues faster with better crash reporting
The most important part of a crash reporting tool is being able to detect and diagnose a wide range of crashes. Instabug supports all crash types that you might encounter to ensure that any error is quickly identifiable. These crash types include:
- Out Of Memory (OOM) errors on mobile: OOM errors happen on avg ~5x more than normal crashes
- iOS-specific crashes such as C++ Exceptions and SwiftUI Exception
- Network Crashes: Crashes due to Network errors (4xx, 5xx, and slow requests)
Instabug also gives you more information beyond just the crash. The conditions that led up to the crash are key to figuring out and fixing the issue. The session profiler captures the state and timeline of the device (memory, CPU, battery, and connectivity) in the last 60 seconds before the app crashes. Another useful feature is repro steps, which replay the interactions a user makes with your app up until a crash is reported grouped by each screen-name.
You can take it a step further with powerful filtering across all data points of reported errors including custom key-value attributes. Instabug also supports filtering on feature flags and experiments (A/B tests) to help new features meet your standards for stability before they reach all of your users.
Application performance monitoring for mobile apps
Crashes simply don’t tell you everything
Performance issues can seriously affect the user experience long before an app crashes. Monitoring app performance helps you take a proactive approach towards improving quality instead of waiting for a crash or error to occur or hearing negative feedback from users. Instabug’s APM tool helps you track key metrics to improve your app’s performance, including Apdex scores, UI hangs, network timeouts and issues, slow launches, tracking custom traces, and more.
Balance performance improvements and new features
Align your team around one quality metric to decide whether to build versus fix. With the help of an app apdex score, know exactly how many users are seeing a satisfying, tolerable, or frustrating experience.
Resolve your critical issues faster
Utilize performance patterns to narrow down your investigations. Know if an issue relates to a specific app version, device, network connection, or any relevant factor. Inspect score over time to spot trends and spikes.
Bug reporting for direct user feedback
It is impossible to avoid bugs altogether. Similar to crashes, the best way to handle them is to be able to quickly detect, diagnose, and fix them before they affect a lot of users. Instabug’s bug reporting tool makes it as easy as possible for your testers and users to report bugs and as easy as possible for your developers to understand the problem and fix it. This is crucial for both internal testing and for live apps.
And while APM and crash reporting are important to app quality, they’re missing a critical dimension: the voice of your users. With bug reporting, you complete the picture by collecting real user feedback, from which you can learn tons of valuable insights.
Feature comparison table
Why mobile-first companies choose Instabug vs Sentry for mobile app crash reporting and performance monitoring
Instabug | Sentry | |
|---|---|---|
Real-time full stack error and crash reporting | ✔️ | ✔️ |
3rd-party integrations a suite of tools | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Email alerts and customizable notifications | ✔️ | ✔️ |
NDK and ANR crash detection | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Network crashes | ✔️ | ❌ |
OOM, C++, SwiftUI exception detection | ✔️ | ❌ |
Repro steps, session profiler (memory, CPU consumption) | ✔️ | ❌ |
Feature flags/experiments (A/B tests) | ✔️ | ❌ |
Application Performance Monitoring | ✔️ | ❌ |
Bug Reporting | ✔️ | ❌ |
Instabug’s triple threat of APM, Crash Reporting, and Bug Reporting tools will empower you to optimize your app’s performance and deliver the high-quality experience your users expect and deserve.
Learn more at https://instabug.com/improve-app-quality-performance.
More app quality resources:
Instabug empowers mobile teams to accelerate their workflows and release with confidence through Real-Time Contextual Insights across the entire app lifecycle.
